


Devour

by Surefall



Series: The Write and Post Adventures [6]
Category: Cable and Deadpool, Deadpool (Comics), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Carnivorous Alien Parasites, M/M, rated for language, rated for mature themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 23:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11770233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Surefall/pseuds/Surefall
Summary: Sometimes Wade and Nate just spend a quiet evening at home, hanging out and eating each other.





	Devour

**Author's Note:**

> Have some techno virus. Watch out, it bites.

Nathan had been infected with the techno virus as a toddler, early enough for the competing electrical feedback of nerves and virus to be integrated together, as if he had been born that way instead of forcefully modified. It was only later, during meditation with his first teachers, struggling with a telepathic gift that grew faster than his ability to control it, that Nathan had discovered he could tell the difference between flesh and metal, the difference between touching (heat/pressure/texture) with his fingertips and tasting (heat/flavor/aroma/texture) with every inch of his metal mesh.

He touched with his hand, but the techno virus tasted, nanites stripping the upper layer of cells from every surface it came in contact with. It even absorbed the very air it passed through, sipping oxygen and nitrogen and soaking up trace vapors ... and always it was eating Nathan. Slowly, slowly, it nipped at him, devouring him bite by microscopic bite, driven by an imperative to replicate and an insatiable hunger. Without Nathan's will to contain it, it wouldn't just devour him, but everything else as well. 

... but it was still a part of him, entwined with him whether he liked it or not.

It breathed for him. 

It ate for him. 

It sensed the world for him.

It was alive in its own single minded way, dedicated to their mutual survival ... because Nathan's survival was the virus' survival.

It could be of use to Nathan if he only had the skill to understand it. 

Nathan didn't throw away a gun just because it had been owned by an enemy and he didn't discard a tool just because it was made in a den of horrors. This too, was just another tool to be turned to purpose. 

So as Nathan learned to handle his growing telepathy, he fine tuned his awareness of the techno virus.

He always knew now, what it tasted. He left his arm bare, to scent the air but not be drowned in the suffocating flavor of dark leather, musty cotton, and sharp dye. The gloves might stifle, but they minimized the unintentional burst of melting flesh and the sparkless corpse metal flavor of his guns. 

Nathan had once thought that the effect on human skin was minimal, nothing more than the removal of already dead cells, a gentle exfoliation rather than a damaging attack ... until Aliya had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder and woke with the burnt red imprint of his mesh on her cheek. It had healed as slowly as a true burn, fading painfully from red to brown to dappled scarring far too slowly for either of them. 

After that, Nathan covered his arm in close company and when he and his wife shared a bedroll. No matter how sweet her coppers had tasted, he would never bring her such pain again.

* * *

Nathan's virus is not a veneer, liquid metal poured across his skin, that enough force and will could crack. It didn't replace him like stone creeping into a corpse, fossilizing flesh to metal, leaving a gleaming replica behind. 

It ate him. 

It broke him down, devouring bone and muscle, mashing sinew and cartilage, to fabricate itself. It stoppered the open wound, the hole it had torn in Nathan when his humerus had been ripped from the socket by relentless metal teeth, by packing itself inside and cauterizing the ragged, bleeding flesh with the brutal waste heat of expansion. In shock and pain, Nathan would have been helpless to stop it. It would have eaten him alive if it hadn't paused to process and fabricate, dispersing gained mass into more of itself. Even then, the machinery of reconstruction was nearly as brutal as the engine of destruction. 

The virus drilled hundreds of holes into his scapula in minutes, forging anchor points to secure its beachhead, until the bone cracked under the strain, tearing Nathan open further as it ruptured. Freshly forged molten metal surged into the gaps, burning through the pores until Nathan's shoulder was more metal than bone. Each drill point was an anchor for a whip sharp thread that burst from the holes like roots from budding seeds. Liquid nanite slicked the whip thin surfaces in a cloud of steam, swiftly congealing into a thick gel, so dense it absorbed impact like an earthwork. The surface hardened, streams of gel surrounding itself in flexible tubing. Surfaces cracked, thin plating forming overlapping scales. Protected beneath plate and encased in tubing, supported by thicker, stiffer coils, the virus gave the illusion of structure to otherwise free floating mass. 

In that moment of regrouping, Nathan had fought back, instinctive telekinesis forcing the virus out ... but Nathan had been a child, barely more than a baby, and his strength wasn't enough to uproot so brutal and thorough an invader. He could only stop its advance. It had anchored itself to his bones, punctured his scapula, fused with his spine, and sunk its filaments into his nerves. Nathan had salvaged himself, but at the expense of truce with the enemy.

The memory he has of being eaten wasn't even his own memory, but the one he had from his father. Scott had watched his child be torn asunder, unable to help him, unable to comfort him ... only able to send him far away, hoping and praying that someone, anyone, could give Nathan back what he had lost. After gaining the memory, washed in terror and red light, Nathan had never been able to tell Scott that his hope hadn't been answered, that he had sent his child away for _nothing_. 

The future held no answers. Nathan could have the virus ... or he could have a hole where a third of his body used to be. By the end of it, it wasn't just his arm that had been lost. His shoulder, spine, half his ribs and part of his skull was hopelessly compromised by the anchor bolting effect of the virus ... and that didn't cover the amount of soft tissue loss along his left side. 

The infection was beyond their ability to remove and it was left to Nathan to halt its advance. It was a battle that Nathan might continue to win ... but the war would ultimately be lost.

* * *

Until there was Wade.

Touching Wade was like licking static, like holding a mouth full of pop rocks, fizzing and bubbling, crackling and sweet. 

The nano surface of Nathan's hand had eaten the upper layer of cells on Wade's skin and Wade's cells had bitten him right back, stripping their point of contact of nanites, a sharp toothed reminder that in the battle between two apex cellular predators, only one of them had ever emerged victorious ... and it wasn't the virus.

Wade couldn't be devoured. He was inviolate, seeped in regeneration so aggressive that he burned like starlight on the tongue, ripe and sweet and alive in ways no metal on this earth properly was. Wade was destruction, a purging fire ... and he tasted _delicious_.

Nathan could taste Wade all he liked, trail mesh across his ever changing skin and just _enjoy_ him, without having to worry about harming him. It was Nathan who felt the effect, who shed stripped nanites in slick dew with every brush of contact, beading his mesh with wet death that Wade overlooked as so much condensate. Wade didn't even seem to _notice_ the battle that his skin fought and always won. 

It was a _pleasure_ to watch the virus follow its insatiable hunger into destruction. If it were up to Nathan, he would always be tasting lightning ... but the trick was getting Wade out of his suit, which stank of burned copper and dregs ... and when he did manage to unwrap his friend, the challenge was getting him occupied with something other than trying to get _Nathan_ undressed. 

Bea Arthur was the powers _gift_ to Nathan Summers. He only had to _suggest_ that they could spend a quiet evening watching Golden Girls with a side order of cuddling ... and all seduction attempts were immediately waylaid by the siren call of the witty white haired beauty.

The seduction was all well and good, but Nathan just wanted to _taste_ Wade. He just wanted to run his mesh fingers along the stiff ridges and tender valleys in Wade's skin, skimming the curve of muscle and the well sheathed arch of bone. Just stroke slow and steady, building an easy rhythm that melted the tension beneath Nathan's hand into boneless submission, until Wade pressed up into the palm of his hand and purred, until even those pleased noises faded into the trusting, even breathing of sleep. Just _touch_ , slow and steady and even, and all the while his fingers peeled Wade open a molecule at a time, layer by layer, bite by bite ...

... until Nathan's own carefully held control slowly unwound, the filaments of his mesh spiralling apart, fingers corkscrewing open, silver muscle fiber unspooling from the thicker coil beneath into individual threads, the slender barbwire flails of the virus unbound by expectation, hooking gently into the regenerating river of Wade's skin to drink lightning with a million tiny mouths.

Nathan didn't have an arm. He had tendrils by the hundreds, that had woven and shaped themselves into the facsimile of an arm, following the unconscious expectation of his hindbrain, that still thought it had four limbs instead of three limbs and a virus.

Wrapped in silver, Wade gave a little shuddering shake, displacing the grip of Nathan's tendrils as their teeth gave way, bitten off by the wet roll of regeneration. His grip slid in the damp of so much discard, and caught anew, a fresh wave of nanites surfacing to replace what had been torn away. Wade wriggled sleepily onto his side, shoving his nose into Nathan's thigh as he lazily cracked an eye, "Hey, Nate, did you know your arm is spaghetti?"

**Author's Note:**

> Abrupt endings are abrupt! ... but this is why it's a write and post adventure!


End file.
